11月6日GRE考试真题回顾之阅读部分详解

Although several ancient cultures practiced mummification, mummies from ancient Egypt are generally more well-preserved than mummies of similar antiquity from other cultures. One possible explanation for this difference is that the mummification techniques or material used by ancient Egyptians were better than those of other cultures. A second, more likely, explanation is that the extremely dry climate of ancient Egypt was largely responsible, given that dryness promotes the preservation of organic remains generally.

12. Which is the following provide the most support for the argument?

A. The materials used by ancient Egyptians for mummification were not used by any other ancient culture that practiced mummification

B. Some ancient Egyptian mummies are better preserved than other ancient Egyptian mummies form around the same time.

C. No ancient people living in very damp areas practiced mummification.

D. Bodies from ancient Egyptian tombs dating from before the practice of mummification began are almost as well preserved as ancient Egyptian mummies.

E. Ancient mummies discovered in places other than Egypt have typically not been as well protected from the elements as ancient Egyptian mummies were.

Buell’ study of village sketches (a type of fiction popular in the United States in the 1830s and 1840s) provides a valuable summary of sketches that portray the community as homogeneous and fixed, but it ignores those by women writers, which typically depicted the diversity that increasingly characterized actual village communities at that time. These women’s geographical mobility was restricted (although women writers of the time were not uniformly circumscribed in this way), and their subject matter reflected this fact. Yet their texts were enriched by what Gilligan, writing in a different context, has called the ability to attend to voices other than one’s own. To varying degrees, the women’s sketches portray differences among community members: all stress differences among men and among women (particularly the latter) as well as differences between the sexes, and some also depict cultural diversity. These writers represent community as dynamic, as something that must be negotiated and renegotiated because of its members’ divergent histories, positions, expectations, and beliefs.

Consider each of the choices separately and select all that apply.1. According to the passage, village sketches written by women in the United States in the 1830s and 1840s typically reflectedA. the negotiations that characterized trade relationships between villagesB. the fact that these women did not often travel very far beyond their own villageC. the plurality of experiences and ideas that existed among the residents of a village

2. Select the sentence in the passage that contrasts how men and women depicted life in village communities.

3. The passage indicates that when Gilligan spoke of “the ability to attend to voices other than one’s own,” sheA. did not consider that ability to be a desirable psychological characteristicB. did not believe that individuals differ greatly with respect to that ability

C. was implying that that ability enhances a sense of belonging in communities

D. was assuming that good writers are able to depict diverse charactersE. was not discussing the women who wrote village sketches

Passage 54（短文章／新发现分析／生物／易）

The discovery of subsurface life on Earth, surviving independently from surface life, refuted the belief that biological processes require not only liquid water but sunlight as well, thus greatly enhancing the possibility of life beyond Earth. Take Jupiter’s moon Europa. Space probes show a body covered with a thick layer of ice. As Europa orbits its planet, however, it flexes due to the gravitational tug-of-war between it,its sister moons, and Jupiter. Through friction, this flexing produces heat in the moon’s interior capable of melting ice. Indeed, observations suggest liquid water exists beneath Europa’s icy crust. Photosynthetic life is impossible there because sunlight is completely absent, but life such as the microbes that flourish deep within earth may still be possible.

Consider each of the choices separately and select all that apply

1. Life on Europa in the form suggested in the passage would be dependent on

A. the protection Europa’s icy crust gives against the harmful components of sunlight

Until around 1930 few United States Civil War historians paid much attention to Southerners who opposed the 1861-1865 secession from the United States by a confederacy of Southern states. Southern historians clung instead to a notion of the South’s unanimity in the face of Northern aggression. Only when scholars such as Lonn decided to examine this side of the war did historian of the Confederacy begin to recognize the existence of Southerners loyal to the Union (Unionists). While these early historians of Southern dissent broke new ground, they also reproduced Confederate authoritie’s negative view of loyalists as shady characters driven by dubious motives. Even Tatum, who took a largely sympathetic attitude toward loyalists, tended to lump them into nebulous categories, offering broad generalizations that ignored the particulars of Unionists’ identities and experiences.

This early-twentieth-century historiography nonetheless represented the leading research on dissent in the South until the 1960s and 1970s. Spurred by the advent of social historical methods, a new generation of historians found Unionists interesting as manifestations of the Confederacy’s internal weaknesses. Focusing on the Appalachian Mountain and upper South regions of the Confederacy, these scholars argued that there was a profound divide among Southern Whites between those who benefited economically from slave-run plantations and those who did not. One such historian was Escott, who emphasized regional and economic conflict among Southerners. Escott cast Unionists and other dissenters as antiplanter mountaineers who could not, by reason of economic and social alienation, identify with the proslavery Southern cause. This theme has heavily influenced the work of subsequent scholars, who commonly place Unionists at the extreme end of a continuum of class-based Confederate disaffection that was ultimately responsible for the South’s collapse. Because the driving force behind such inquiries into loyalist history has been a desire to explain Confederate ideology, politics, and defeat, emphasis has been placed on the ways loyalist Southerners diverged from the political and economic mainstream of Confederate nationalism.

Only recently have some Civil War historians begun to make Unionists and their experiences, rather than the Confederate state, the center of inquiry. These scholars have done intensive community and local studies of dissenting groups that take into account a range of social and cultural, as well as military and political, factors at work on the Southern home front. Hoping to better understand who remained loyal to the Union during the war, these historians have sought to explain the Civil War’s underlying character, dimensions, and impact in particular counties or towns, especially in the upper South and Appalachia. This relatively new trend has stressed the particular, delved into the complexities of political allegiances on the home front, and, as Sutherland notes, highlighted “the gritty experience of real people”.

由于篇幅原因，题干省略~

Passage 61（短文章／问题描述／对比／中等）

Our terrestrial food supply comes from ecosystems transformed to produce a few comestible species through the removal of competitors, predators, and pests, but marine capture fisheries depend on the overall productivity of natural ecosystems. There is, however, increasing concern about the impact of fishing and other human activities on marine ecosystems, which are now far from pristine. One option for moving toward both biodiversity and terrestrial food supply goals is to produce greater yields from less land, thereby freeing land for conservation purposes. By contrast, the objective of maintaining or resorting the biodiversity of marine ecosystems may conflict with the objective of maintaining or increasing our food supply from the sea, since the level of fishing required to achieve the latter may compromise the former.

1. The primary purpose of the passage is to

A. examine the impact of certain research findings regarding changes to ecosystem biodiversity.

B. discuss a possible implication of a difference between terrestrial and marine food supply sources.

C. describe the consequences of a certain kind of interaction between terrestrial and marine ecosystems.

D. identify an area of ecosystem research in which here are significant uncertainties

E. present evidence that undermines one side of a debate about biodiversity and supports the other.

2. According to the passage, increasing the food yield per unit of land can have which of the following effects?A. enabling more land to be used for development purposes

B. compromising progress toward conservation goals

C. helping protect comestible species from competition and predation

D. helping reduce pressure on marine ecosystems

E. helping restore the biodiversity of terrestrial ecosystems

Passage 72（长文章／新老观点论证／地质／中等）

Roughly 250 million years ago, in the worst series of mass extinction in Earth’s history, almost all species of life simply vanished. The traditionally held view has been that these extinctions occurred gradually, as changing environmental conditions—global cooling, global warming, dropping sea levels, or some combination of such factors—made life increasingly difficult during the last stages of the Permian period (284-245 million years ago). As Permian life-forms declined, they reached a fatal threshold and species succumbed to mass extinction. Supporters of the traditionalist view note that species begin disappearing from the fossil record well before the end of the Permian period. Yet, while such a pattern could have resulted from a slowly rising extinction rate, some scientists argue that just because a species disappears from the fossil record doesn’t necessarily mean it became extinct at that point. Moreover, Paul Wignall and others have found sites where marine fossil deposits reached a peak of diversity at the very end of the Permian period. Thus, Wignall believes late-Permian marine life was thriving until it was decimated suddenly by some catastrophe.

Some geoscientists think that this catastrophe involved a meteor striking the earth. Michael Rampino, for instance, claims that a giant meteor crashed into Gondwanaland (the southern portion of the supercontinent Pangea, which covered about 30 percent of the globe in Permian times), setting off intense volcanism. Airborne soot and dirt from the impact blanketed Earth, inhibiting photosynthesis and triggering mass extinction of species. This view is widely disputed by traditionalists, however, Grant Young, for example, holds that the gradual breakup of the Pangean supercontinent triggered widespread climatic change and glaciation,causing the Permian mass extinctions to occur over million of years. Glaciation, Young claims, has occurred throughout Earth’s history, and there is evidence that it occurred toward the end off the Permian period. Yet Rampino and others question one of the traditionalists’ basic assumption: the periodic occurrence of glaciation throughout Earth’s history. Crucial evidence includes the rock deposits know as tillites, because they resemble the unstratified drift produced by modern glaciers, geologists have long considered tillites to be signposts of glaciation. When trying to determine whether particular sedimentary layers represent tillite deposits, geologists look for stones with faceted shapes, scratched surfaces, and other features that presumably resulted from glacial action. The problem with ascribing all tillites to glaciation, however, is that tillite deposits are widespread in Precambrian sediments. Yet temperatures during the Precambrian (3.8 billion to 540 million years ago)are thought to have been warmer than those in today’s nonglacial world. Thus, Rampino thinks that certain tillites were produced by meteor impacts, not glaciers. The first compelling evidence that meteor impacts might have produced tillites came from Moon rocks that showed the same features as earthly tillites. Since no one believes the Moon ever had glaciers, that leaves but one possible cause: impacts.

1. The primary purpose of the passage is to

A. consider new applications for a traditional methodology

B. present a challenge to an established idea

C. question the purported severity of a particular phenomenon

D. discuss the implications of a controversial position

E. identify similarities underlying two contrasting arguments

2. According to the passage, the claim that all terrestrial tillites resulted from glacial action is undermined by the

A. surface features of most terrestrial tillites

B. resemblance that exists between terrestrial tillites and unstratified drift

C. number of terrestrial tillites that date from the Precambrian period

D. facts that most terrestrial tillites are found in sedimentary deposits

E. evidence that they resemble the drift produced by modern glaciers

3. It can be inferred from the passage that author would agree that the similarity between terrestrial tillites and certain Moon rocks is significant because this similarity

A. suggest that it is unlikely that glaciers have produced tillites on Earth

B. suggest that the rate of meteor impacts on the Moon is much higher than previously thought

C. provides the first compelling evidence that the Moon has experienced meteor impacts

E. supports Young’s claim, regarding the periodic occurrence of glaciers throughout Earth’s history

4. The passage suggests that the supporters of the traditional view would be most likely to disagree with the “scientists”（首段第9行） over which of the following regarding the fossil record during the Permian period?

A. the number of species that disappeared from the fossil record during the Permian period

B. the significance of a species disappearance from the fossil record during the Permian period

C. the point in time at which species began disappearing from the fossil record during the Permian period

D. the likelihood that the fossil record during the Permian period will be supplemented by new fossil discoveries

E. the likelihood that the fossil record during the Permian period is as accurate as the fossil records of other periods